Source: Terence Tao — "What's New" — 2026-07-11
Summary
Fields Medalist Terence Tao describes using a modern AI coding agent to port decades-old Java applets from his math courses — originally written around 1999 — into working modern JavaScript in a matter of hours. He then used the same approach to generate a new interactive visualization tool to accompany his paper on the Gilbreath conjecture. The post reached #1 on Hacker News the following day.
Key Takeaways
- A 27-year-old, long-dead Java codebase was fully revived and made functional again by an agent in hours rather than the weeks or months manual porting would have required.
- Tao judges this class of task — supplementary, non-mission-critical visualizations — as low-downside-risk for agent delegation, distinct from core proof-critical code.
- He signals he may routinely add agent-generated interactive supplements to future papers.
- Notable as a rare "trusted primary source" endorsement of coding-agent reliability for a specific, bounded use case, from a top mathematician rather than a vendor.